“Have you ever thought of the frightful thing it is to shift one's centre? That is what it is to love a woman.”

His striking image for love as a relocation of the self's whole gravity · Critical essay on Keats, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry

• Love

“In this endeavour to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists, literature, bowed down by so many burdens, may at last attain liberty.”

His hope for literature freed from mere description of surfaces · The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899

• Art
• Truth

“He does not realise, as the great novelists have realised, that stupidity can be pathetic, and that there is not a peasant in whom the soul has not its part.”

His insistence that even unremarkable lives hold something worth an artist's sympathy · Critical essay on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

• Art
• Truth